bottom of the well
by sailorpallas
Summary: Long ago a heroe delved deep into a well for a forgotten relic, this is the story of the well and the man who owned it


1.

Along time ago lived a man. He had a pleasant little house that sat in the valley of a great mountain and cliffs. He worked the very respectable job of physician for his town and a great many people were able to continue their life's because of his healing. Every night he would go to his house on the hill which held the towns windmill and he would say to himself _what disgusting creatures these are _and would proceed down into the dark cellars of his house. In the cellars he worked tirelessly studying the anatomy of creatures trying to figure out why they would stop moving yet on occasion some would rise as a mindless redead or a strange poe. Many a night he would make expeditions out into the graves of the citizens to find a fresh body to test and play with, for many years he was unable to have anything happen until one fateful night he was standing on the pedestal to the sealed mausoleum, a place that he was never able to enter into when a great bolt struck his body. He was unable to divine whether it was magical or merely lightning but one thing did come from it. The ability to se. to see what everyone did and what none did. The ability to see the truth.

2.

the doctor was able to see many things such as though the body and mind had rotted a redead moved through pure will and a poe was nothing but a flame in a jar but possessed such a great mind that it was able to cast an illusion on any that came near it. This fascinated him greatly and made him wish that he had a human to test it on. That same night a traveller dressed in royal garbs came asking for solace for the night. The doctor gave him large amounts of food and copious amounts of wine all with a pleasant if haunting smile, he led the man into the cellar and gave him a nice sized if rather hard bed to sleep upon. He dreamt of terrible things, of screams ion the dark, of knives being cut into him, and of his body being opened up in front of his own eyes and yet when he awoke the next morning he felt perfect, the doctor gave him a nice breakfast and sent him on his way completely unaware he was missing a few vital organs and would soon die. The doctor used the same techniques that he had found from the redead to extend his movement and stored the organs distilled in poes souls. The messenger passed away less than a mile from his destination with no one able to divine the cause. The doctor was left to his thoughts the possibilities opening up before his eyes on what he could use these powers that he now held to do.

3.

Not nearly a month after the messenger a plague hit the small town and the doctor became a very busy man in both his work and study, he took about one in every ten people whether they were ill or not down to his lab for study and inform the family that unfortunately they would not make it through the night and he would take them to the graveyard in the morning to prevent the spread. His basements had grown exponentially and soon spread under the entire town. He used his basements as a prison for people so he could work at his leisure sometimes using anaesthesia and sometimes not just to see what would happen. He took people and transformed them into strange creature; some formed together into odd hands with no visible form of feeding yet would grasp on to anyone and take them to oblivion, others a mound of pure flesh which would melt into the surface only to rise again and the truly unfortunate would be made into paintings or decorations that lined his basement screaming and pleading in perpetual torment for help but with none able to listen to there tortured cries. Many years passed and soon the Great War which had been raging just outside the town had ended, one that had never struck the city directly but the people had seen the effect of. Darkest was the night that they appeared one male and one female, or perhaps one female and one male they seemed to disappear into the darkness by merely looking at them. They told him in a voice that was no more than an echo on the wind that they knew of his work and wished to proposition a job of him, he knew to respect these people as he had not once even hinted to his secret pleasures and thus he took the task. The tasks were simple enough remove the head and hands of the prisoner and yet keep them alive perpetually in shadows, lose them in the darkest part of the basement and seal it never to think of it again, the reward for such a task was beyond his wildest imagination.

4.

The visitors of the night had given him an odd gift a magnifying glass it was the most beautiful violet colour and the lens was a pure crystal with only one flaw, a small red dot which adorned the centre which gave the entire gift the look of an eye. He put it away not thinking of it for a few moths until one day it appeared on his desk, a place he was sure he had not left it. Lost in thought he took it up and peered deep into the crystal finally bringing it inches from his eyes, a shock of pain racked his body and then nothing, he felt for his eyes but there were none, no hole or eyeball but just a smooth surface and yet he could see more clearly than even with his gift he could, the lens had changed as well, it shone with colours that would drive a man mad to peer through and yet so inviting that one could not resist the glass only helped him more revealing secrets that mortal dare not know of life until he was able to begin on his greatest work, it took him months and years and soon even the people in the town forgot of the doctor and his strange ways continually replacing parts of his body that failed with new ones and drinking poes souls to keep him going. The final stitch was made on what he considered the most perfect creature ever, it had endless hands that even when destroyed would come back, a body of pure ivory in contrast to its alabaster eyes, an eternal smile of deep red and a soul that even when burned to nothing would reform the body. The first thing it did was devour its creator using his flesh to grow , it burrowed deep within the ground sending out its hands to the farthest reaches of the world perhaps holding a lost toy or a forgotten mirror waiting for someone to grasp for it waiting for someone to feed it. Some say that the terrible life of the doctor ended there and that his body was completely gone. A few though say that the doctor escaped barely alive and was able to set up a shop in a grand city offering cures and rewards for poes and in the night roaming to find new people to play with.


End file.
